Wit leaps centuries and hemispheres. It does not collect dust, and, when done right, it does not age. “The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas,” by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, is a case in point. Long forgotten by most, it’s one of the wittiest, most playful, and therefore most alive and ageless books ever written. It is a love story—many love stories, really—and it’s a comedy of class and manners and ego, and it’s a reflection on a nation and a time, and an unflinching look at mortality, and all the while it’s an intimate and ecstatic exploration of storytelling itself. It is a glittering masterwork and an unmitigated joy to read, but, for no good reason at all, almost no English speakers in the twenty-first century have read it (and I first read it only recently, in 2019).
But it survives, and must be read, for the music of its prose and, more than anything else, for its formal playfulness. A new translation, by Flora Thomson-DeVeaux, is a glorious gift to the world, because it sparkles, because it sings, because it’s very funny and manages to capture Machado’s inimitable tone, at once mordant and wistful, self-lacerating and romantic. Its narrator, Brás Cubas, is dead. He tells the story of his life from the grave, and maybe because he has nothing left to lose—being dead and all—he tells the story precisely as he wants to, convention be damned. The novel unfolds in brief, bright chapters, brightened further with endless self-referentiality and self-doubt. “I am beginning to regret that I ever took to writing this book,” Brás Cubas writes in a chapter called “The Flaw in the Book.” “Not that it tires me,” he continues. “I have nothing else to do, and dispatching a few meager chapters into the other world is invariably a bit of a distraction from eternity.”
The story, at its core, is almost conventional, a nineteenth-century aristocratic love triangle. Brás Cubas hovers at the edges of Rio de Janeiro’s moneyed classes but lacks the will to marry (his sister’s obsession) or the ambition to rise within the government (his father’s wish). He passes on a chance to marry the beautiful Virgília and be catapulted into public life by her powerful father. Instead, an honorable man named Lobo Neves takes both Virgília’s hand and her father’s mentorship, and it’s only then that Brás Cubas begins to feel drawn to Virgília. They begin an affair, and try—not so hard, really—to keep it hidden from Virgília’s too trusting husband. Soon everyone in Rio’s society seems to know, with the danger of discovery only drawing the lovers closer.
Meanwhile, Brás Cubas contemplates the meaning of life (from the grave), aided by his friend Quincas Borba, who is trying to popularize a philosophy called Humanitism, designed, Machado writes, “to ruin all the rest.” At its core is a belief in the rightness of anything human. Brás Cubas admits that it’s Panglossian but finds a certain comfort in the radical notion that humans should be allowed to do anything humans naturally do, that whatever we do we are meant to do—with special reverence for the making of more humans. “Love, for example,” he writes, “is a priesthood; reproduction, a ritual. Since life is the greatest benefit the universe can bestow . . . it follows that the transmission of life, far from being an occasion for gallanting, is the supreme hour of a spiritual Mass. Hence there is truly only one misfortune in life: never being born.”
Machado veers between the book’s love story and its metaphysical interludes with ease, in part because though the book is about earnest things—love, life itself, the finality of death—it never takes itself seriously. In Chapter IV, “The Fixed Idea,” Machado begins a grand analogy comparing lesser human endeavors to those that echo through the ages. “To offer a poor analogy, it is like the rabble, sheltered in the shadow of the feudal castle; the castle fell and the rabble remained. Indeed, they became grand in their own right, a veritable stronghold . . . No, the analogy’s really no good.” The chapter titles themselves are disarming. One chapter, aptly called “Sad, but Short,” is followed by “Short, but Happy,” which is both. There is a chapter dedicated to boots, another to the author’s legs, while another is called “Not to Be Taken Seriously.” Chapter CXXX is titled “To Be Inserted Into Chapter CXXIX,” and at the end of it, the author asks that the reader insert it between the first and second sentences of the previous chapter. There’s also a long hallucination involving a hippopotamus.
Somehow none of the gags and intertextual fun does anything to diminish the power of the story. The romance between Brás Cubas and Virgília is convincing and wildly lyrical. The feeling we have for the unwitting Lobo Neves is real, and the crime that the narrator and Virgília commit on him is never punished—in life or death. And this is key. This is an atheistic book, where there is no judge but one’s conscience, and where the offender lies alone, in a box permeated by worms, recounting his life and failures without any heavenly consequence. It’s funny, too. It is wholly original and unlike anything other than the many books that came after it and seem to have knowingly or not borrowed from it.
Readers are an amnesiac species, and so, every few decades, we wake up to believe that an author addressing the reader directly, or playing with form, or including references to the author or the book within that book, is new and should be labelled post or meta or whatever unfortunate and confining term will come next. But the fact is that an outsized number of the classics of the world employ one or many of these so-called post/meta devices. It began with Cervantes, who allowed Don Quixote and Sancho Panza to be aware, in Book II, that they were characters in Book I. “Candide”—which Machado references many times—is endlessly self- aware, and Thackeray, in “Vanity Fair,” makes so many references to the author’s presence and powers and omniscience that a reader loses count. Joyce and Austen and Nabokov and Sterne—also referenced by Machado—and Stein and Pessoa and legions more have experimented with the form of the novel, have inserted and questioned their authorial authority, and their willingness to experiment, and to have some fun with the relationship between writer, reader, and the book itself, have kept the form fresh and surprising, and so have kept it alive.
But now it is different. Now strangely—so strangely—we live in times of profound traditionalism in literature, and it’s difficult to explain why. I had the enormous pleasure a few years ago to judge a contest to name the year’s best novel, and the committee I was part of had an unexpectedly good time doing the job. There were so many brilliant books. But, of the four hundred or so American novels we were asked to read that year, only a few dozen could be called funny, only a few could be called playful, and I counted exactly two that were in any significant way experimental. If that’s not an indication of a general fear of the new, a hesitation to take chances, and a startling and ill-advised self-seriousness about the novel, I’m not sure what is. This isn’t to say that all novels, or even most, should be, or could be, as playful as this one, but it wouldn’t hurt to have a few more that allow humans—characters, readers, authors even—to laugh. Denying the jokes in life, and the joke of life itself, is too sad.
This essay was drawn from the introduction to “The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas,” which is out in June from Penguin Classics.
